Jane Harman resigned from Congress February 28, 2011 to join the Woodrow Wilson Center as its first female Director, President and CEO.

Representing the aerospace center of California during nine terms in Congress, she served on all the major security committees: six years on Armed Services, eight years on Intelligence, and eight on Homeland Security. During her long public career, Harman has been recognized as a national expert at the nexus of security and public policy issues, and has received numerous awards for distinguished service.

She is a member of the Defense Policy Board, the State Department Foreign Policy Board, and the Homeland Security Advisory Committee. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission and the Advisory Board of the Munich Security Conference.

Harman is a Trustee of the Aspen Institute and the University of Southern California. She is also a member of the Presidential Debates Commission.

A product of Los Angeles public schools, Harman is a magna cum laude graduate of Smith College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and Harvard Law School. Prior to serving in Congress, she was Staff Director of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Deputy Cabinet Secretary to President Jimmy Carter, Special Counsel to the Department of Defense, and in private law practice.

She has four adult children and four grandchildren.

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Director Jane Harman discusses the escalating violence between Israel and the Palestinians and the immigration crisis on CBS News' Talk of the Nation with Gerald Seib, Danielle Pletka, and Nia-Malika Henderson. more

"The goal [of U.S. Middle East policy] is a strategy shaped together with the Middle Eastern world: leaders and peoples alike, borrowing the best impulses of the bottom-up Arab Spring and the traditionally top-down U.S. approach to engagement. Our promise to the Middle East must be one in which collaboration helps the people of the region achieve shared values by a route of their own choice," writes Jane Harman in The Washington Post. more

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"Security and liberty are not a zero-sum game. We either get more or less of both....Curtailing tactics that inflame alienated populations, while enhancing techniques that help us find those among us who are radicalized, gives us far better odds of reducing risk," argues Jane Harman.

Jane Harman and Zbigniew Brzezinski debate a U.S. intervention in Syria on Morning Joe. "I hope we have a strategy to work this out diplomatically with the Russians on the other side and the leader is moved out even if he stays in country and another transitional government takes his place,” said Jane Harman.

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While the means of combating terrorist threats may have changed, the end for preserving international security remains the same. We need strategies, not just tactics — and a necessary part of that equation is creating a durable legal structure for remote-control warfare that will secure buy-in from a global audience, writes Jane Harman in this op-ed.

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